Win more customers with our help!
On-line learning, coaching and workshops
to boost your business success
Do you find it easy to find new customers?
Are you confident your marketing is sending the right messages?
Are you sure you are reaching the right people at the right time?
Are you worried about missing opportunities to sell your services?
I can help you right now, with affordable on-line courses, support and business action plans.
Wouldn’t it be great if people knew about your products or services, and just queued up to buy! I know that attracting new clients to a business is tough. Selling to them can be even tougher.
People are bombarded with marketing messages all day long. How can you stand out? Unless you know what to say, how to say it and when, your marketing won’t bring the results you expect. These are the magic ingredients that make all the difference, and I’ll show you what to do.
My courses and workshops include quick-start guides and templates to help you to quickly become successful and makes sure everything you do brings results.
Every business, even big brands from Apple to Zanussi, has to compete to win customers and you can too using the marketing and selling experience I am sharing through my courses.
I can help you because I’ve been marketing and selling for most of my career. I have pitched against huge international brands – successfully. I have sold services to clients who initially didn’t want to talk to me.
I only recently realised how unusual I am – someone who has had a career in both marketing and sales, and fully understands how customers buy from beginning to end.
I passionately believe we must have a completely joined-up approach to Marketing and Sales. After all, it is the same thing to the customer.
I have brought together my marketing knowledge, sales skills and an understanding of people’s behaviour from my time in business management to create what I believe is a unique set of services:
on-line learning with coaching and support plus live workshops with one aim in mind:
To help you sell more and make your business even more successful.
When you register (free) for the Ascent Club you can access member-only sales and marketing resources
If you are busy and want to quickly learn the best ways to attract more clients and grow your business, then our on-line course packages are right for you.
You can watch the lessons at any time of day and pace the course to suit your timescale. Our flagship courses include:
You will have plenty of reference material to keep. The templates will help you get started quickly and apply what you have learned.
One of the advantages of a face to face course is that you can ask your tutor questions. Well you can do that with our on-line courses too! We include up to six months virtual support with our flagship courses so you can ask questions about the course content or applying what you have learned to your own business.
Finally – running a business can seem lonely sometimes, but you are not alone on our courses. We also include membership of our growing community of people who are building their businesses – just like you.
Why delay? Register for the course that fits your needs, apply what you have learned and see your business grow!
Here is a collection of our own videos and ones we particularly like from other contributors. There are also ebooks and assessments to download and enjoy.
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Our survival instincts are always in the back of our mind. Being alert to possible danger kept our ancestors alive, and that same brain function can interfere with the the sales process. This short video explains what people are afraid of, and what you can do about it.
How to use the Green Screen feature to create interesting backgrounds for your videos
How to market your business in a crisis Part 1. Firstly, you need to understand how demand has changed, then you can align your marketing.
Tips, guides and articles on marketing, sales and operations to help you grow your business
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Never, ever, ever tell a lie (pork pie, porkies) in selling or marketing. “I never, ever, would” you might say. When does a cool creative idea stray into the territory of half-truths and untruths though? Quite often. The danger of this is in the execution. If you get found out, your whole credibility is blown. You have probably lost a valuable sale because of an idea that seemed good at
Someone recently questioned whether I had permission to use a 10-second clip from the movie “Dunkirk” in my video “ Why words are not enough ”. The answer is No, and here’s why. I am relying on the interpretation of Fair Dealing (the equivalent is Fair Use in the USA) which provides exceptions to copyright law to allow for free speech. Fair Dealing doesn’t tell you what you can or can’t do, it just provides
If you are making marketing videos indoors with a smartphone, webcam or camera, you will need some form of lighting to enhance your subject. If you can get away with using available natural or artificial light, that is ideal (as described in our course on making videos with your smartphone ). In many cases however, that isn’t possible particularly if you have to use a home studio – a grand title for a spare bedroom
Many people watch video content on their tablets and smartphones in public places or at work where they don’t want to disturb others with sound. The closed captioning (cc) or subtitles feature in many video players means they can read text instead of listening. To add subtitles on video platforms such as Vimeo you have to upload a file often called a .srt or .vtt file containing the transcript and
Offering a useful free downloadable document through social media is a very good way of attracting and engaging with potential customers. It provides evidence of your expertise and you are already adding value even before the customer buys something. Examples are guides, tip sheets, checklists, infographics (like the one above) and anything else that is genuinely useful in itself, and is not a sales brochure. Here are four tips to
There are a lot of very good videos and articles on LinkedIn and other social media. They provide evidence of the author’s expertise or skill, but many stand alone, with no links to anything else. If you are selling your services, this is a missed opportunity. Every buyer is on a journey. Customers don’t wake up in the morning, reach for their phone and buy something. They go through progressive
This can be a bit awkward if you are not used to it. Also, even if you are used to it, it can have unsatisfactory results. Imagine you were at a networking event or you were exhibiting at a trade show, and you had a conversation with someone who seemed to be a likely customer for your business. You probably also exchanged business cards. The follow-up call A few days
I love historical stories of great marketers who weren’t actually marketers ( Cicero , Aristotle Cave Men ). This week I discovered Frederick the Great’s Marketing Problem. He ruled Prussia from 1740-1786 and although he is probably best known for his military activities, he was also a great moderniser for social improvement and wealth creation. When there was a risk of famine in Prussia, he introduced the potato which had only recently been
During October you will be bombarded with “help” to prepare for Brexit, from the DIT to anyone who wants to climb on the bandwagon. Having sat through DIT presentations and seen what other organisations are planning, I can save you a whole lot of trouble. All they will do is signpost you to https://www.gov.uk/find-eu-exit-guidance-business because, quite simply, nobody has a better guide, and nobody has any information on how it will
– and avoid giving things away! Pricing is always a sensitive topic. Customers want to know how much something costs before they buy it, and suppliers don’t want to tell everyone (including their competitors) what something costs because often “it depends”. Unless you are selling a commodity product where the price is known at the start, there is a debate about whether you should expose your pricing structure early on
Coming from a 35 year career in property and financial services, I had employed many marketing initiatives and saw the benefits of these during my career. But, like many I suspect, I had not had the basic training and learnt the building blocks. And social media has influenced marketing to the point where sales and marketing should be much more closely aligned. Undertaking Ascent Learning’s online course entitled The New Marketing Blueprint has been a very accessible, enjoyable and hugely beneficial training course for me. It puts all the pieces of marketing together in a very digestible format. Allied to this you get to keep the slides, transcript and various downloads which are all invaluable. I would strongly recommend this course to anyone and especially those who do not have the dedicated marketing resource and want to maximise their impact in this competitive world. It represents great value for money.
Neville’s blend of skills in sales and marketing, plus learning and development have been a valuable combination for our discussions. My primary gap in knowledge was marketing, and Neville’s vast experience and ability to listen and ask poignant questions has allowed me not only to understand the marketing process, but implement it into my on-line business as well as my face to face provision.
Neville is a particularly good match for my company because has personal and consulting experience in several industries – thus has a wide and liberal perspective on how different business styles can operate. He is patient and encouraging and has raised or elaborated on some issues that I might have struggled with.
What a difference to our sales tactics, marketing approach and above all confidence you have made to us in just such a short time too. Really appreciate your help.
Having recently been tasked with increasing our ‘Digital Brand’, I looked to Neville for assistance. What I got in return was a content rich, easy to understand introduction to a world that I feel much more comfortable with now than I did a week ago. Thank you Neville, I’ll certainly be on one of your courses again!
Here we are now, 5 months on in our new premises, with much more active Twitter and Facebook, a new Instagram account, a growing mailing list and lots of ideas for the future. You have been great at facilitating ideas – giving us confidence in ourselves.
This is just the sort of course I like – packed in and practical. We are very conscious we need to keep pace with multimedia use and marketing and this was just the job to provide the basics, plus some more advanced tips and the steps needed to develop our own strategy
We felt that we got a lot out of the day and looking forward to putting everything we’ve learnt into practice. The ground work you covered in the course is also important. . We thought both Neville and Martine had lots of tips and experience to offer us which we really appreciated, and more than happy to recommend the course. It’s useful in many ways.